


The Spaces Between Words

by TwistofAPen



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 09:24:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwistofAPen/pseuds/TwistofAPen
Summary: Being imprisoned in a hallucination of a mental hospital leaves its scars on Quentin. Tag to 1x04.





	The Spaces Between Words

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed.

Quentin screamed. One second he was nothing and the next, his bones were shaking, skin and muscle torn and stitching back together before he was slammed back into the light. The Madness Maker’s void shattered into shards of vision and sound. 

Voices clamoured for his attention. The world was spinning and everything was red; he knew only his chest heaving and the sensation of tiny sharp feet scrabbling up his throat, stabbing his tongue. He whimpered, hands reaching up to clutch at his throat. He could feel the thing thrashing and clawing at the inside of his throat and he fought the urge to scream. With a jerk he felt an unknown force tugging at it, and he bent over and heaved even as the creature was expelled, flung across the room and landing with a clatter on the floor.

The world shifted and rolled nauseatingly, like being wrenched out of the ocean after a lifetime of drowning. Colors and shapes darted around him in swirls and Monroes, sliding out of focus. His mind scrabbled for purchase - something, anything - sounds sliding off without processing - _somebodywokeuptookyourdamntimegethimsomebrandy._ It was meaningless noise and he found himself gripping the sides of the couch till his fingers hurt,sharp and real. 

A hand patted his head, gently. He shuddered. 

“Hey, uh. Is he okay?”

That voice. Quentin turned his head around, wary, and caught on the sight of Penny a few feet away. Penny who wasn’t a janitor and wasn’t a product of his idiotic fuck-up of a subconscious. _Thank god._

 “...Dude." Penny stared back at him, looking faintly irritated and faintly alarmed. "What?” 

Colour flashed in his peripheral vision. A drink materialized abruptly in front of him. “There you go, Q, on the house.” 

Quentin looked at it. The liquid inside sloshed slightly, like waves on a shore. It was almost pretty, in a nauseating way. His head was a bit of a mess - ripped up pages and scattered chess pieces - and maybe it hadn’t worked, maybe he was just back in a different nightmare, puppet on a string dancing to the Madness Maker’s tune, slow and sickly sweet insanity - 

“Quentin? Can you hear me?” 

“Damn. He doesn’t look too good.”

“...Is he alright?”

“Jesus, I think he’s shaking. Pass me the- ” Something settled gently over him. “Alright, take it easy, there.” Heaviness. Warmth. A blanket? He wasn’t cold. He didn’t understand. He didn’t - 

“Hey, Q? Come on, let’s get you to bed, huh?” A firm grip tugged him upwards and he followed, stumbling into a blur of warmth and dark. 

“Sleep well, Q.” He heard, somewhere far off. “You’re gonna be okay.”

And Quentin slept.

* * *

 

He awoke slowly. His brain stumbled into consciousness, before racing on ahead like as if he’d stepped on all the pedals of a car at once. Quentin scrambled out of the bed, eyes darting to the tall windows and doorway. He trailed his fingers against the soft bedsheets and the smoothed-down wooden table.

It was his room; looked terrifyingly like it, and Quentin felt sick. This was touching too close to reality in a way the mental hospital hadn’t.

He yanked open the cupboard, touched his clothes, his books, his desk, pressed his face against the window. Everything looked normal. 

“No,” Quentin said. “Please. No.” He pressed his palms to his eyes. “Wake up. Wake up wake up _wake up._ ”

At some point he’d slumped against the cupboard, a mild protest from his shoulder hitting the hard wood. There were ugly beasts of emotion tearing him apart inside, screaming. 

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t fucking - _handle_ this any longer, and it wasn’t fair for Penny to appear like a stupid ray of hope and then just disappear, it wasn’t -

Quentin shuddered, and crammed his fist into his mouth in an attempt to stop the ugliness from escaping. This was pathetic. He was pathetic. 

The floor creaked. He stumbled to his feet, whirling around with hands out like that was somehow going to keep the nightmare back. What was he doing? What was he even doing?

“Quentin?”

His subconscious’s rendering of Eliot’s face stared out at him from the doorway, eyes wide and concerned. And that - that just wasn’t _fair._ “That’s not fair,” he repeated out loud, lamely.

Not-Eliot frowned. “Quentin, hey. It’s alright. You’re...you’re safe now, alright?”

“Don't– Stop saying that.” Quentin forced himself to look away. 

“Quentin-”

“Shut. Up.” With the fingers currently gripping his left arm he pressed down hard, nails digging in, fingers leaving long red scratches in their wake. Pain flared down his arm. “Shut up shut up shut up -”

“What are you - Jesus, hey, stop that.” Not-Eliot darted forward, gripping Quentin’s arm. Quentin jerked back, snarling. 

“Get _off_ me, stop -”

“Quentin, just calm down, everything’s okay, just-”

“- it, I’m not falling for it, you-”

“– calm the hell down - ow!”

Eliot stumbled back, reaching down to rub his knee, then stopping. They reached a standstill, Quentin standing tense on one side, Eliot holding his hands out on the other.Quentin wondered where they’d go from here. There was no precedent for this. 

“Quentin,” Eliot said. “I-I’m real. Swear to anything. Please, what would it take for you to believe me?”

Quentin breathed out. Looked around the room - empty. Silent. No other mental patients around them, no peanut gallery to watch him fall. He looked back at Eliot - the coiffed hair, designer clothing - the Brakebills badge. 

“Tell me,” Quentin said. “God, please, tell me magic exists. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

Something flashed across Eliot’s expression, fleeting and cracked. “Oh,” Eliot said, “Oh, Q. I - Magic is real. It’s so fucking real, whether you want it to be or not. It’s wonderful and amazing and out of this world, and it can destroy your life from beneath your feet.

Eliot stepped forward, eyes locked on Quentin’s. 

“You built a palace of cards during your entrance exams, and you almost set the dorms on fire one night when you used the wrong hand movement for Machiavelli’s Spell.” Eliot reached forward, a hand on Quentin’s shoulder, and Quentin jerked. When had he gotten so close?

“You are here, at Brakebills, with me, your brilliant and amazing guide, the man you met when you first stumbled onto campus wearing that atrocious suit and tie."

Quentin felt himself falling. Hands caught him and pulled him close.

“You’re home, Quentin. And you’re not alone.”

_Home_.

 

* * *

 

He told them he was over it. He told himself he was over it. Self-denial, like any other attribute, was just a skill to be mastered. 

At night, he slept and dreamed endless, dark dreams, an abyss of failures, and other nights slept not at all.

One particularly dark night, when everything felt like it was pressing down on Quentin, he snuck out onto the patio to look up at the stars. The wind cut right through his shirt but he stayed, curled up on one of the wooden benches, bringing his knees up to his chest, head tilting back to stare up at the cold, dim lights. 

He wasn’t sure how it started. At some point, he found himself looking at the small patio table, lined with discarded plastic cups and a sticky film of alcohol. A cigarette tray sat in the middle, the stubs within long burned out. 

Quentin’s hands twisted into the gesture for a small fire spell, his fingers working effortlessly through the motions. One of the cigarettes flared and its tip glowed bright. Quentin picked it up. He remembered feeling the warmth spilling out across his fingers. He felt it soaking into his skin. There was a timeless pause, like the framing of a picture: Quentin holding the cigarette up to the night, ambers burning, fingers steady. A wisp of an idea lingering in the air.

And then he turned his free hand over, palm up, and pressed the cigarette down firmly upon the skin. 

His vision whited out; the cigarette dropped onto the ground as his fingers spasmed, nerves screaming. He stared at his hand as the feeling ebbed, gaze transfixed on the circular mark burned into his skin. Moving his fingers experimentally, he felt the skin around the burn stretch, pain flaring. He remembered the feeling of pain. He remembered the feeling of numbness. 

_I felt that. Penny, do it again. Harder.(What kind of shit you into, you sick fuck.)_

It took half a second for the impulse to register before he rolled up his sleeve and brought the cigarette down again, near the inside of his elbow. 

Again. 

Again.

Again. 

Bursts of fire snaking beneath his skin. He flinched with every new mark, and a distant part of his mind clawed desperately at the walls in panic. He gripped on tighter to the cigarette, hating the burn, reveling in it. Pain was reality. Pain was justice for this hand in magic he had been dealt.

He didn't think. His mind scattered, a constellation of stars. The circular marks littered the inside of his arm in a grotesque parody of spots. _Like a dalmation. A leopard. Remember, Quentin. An animal can’t change its spots. What are you trying to do?You keep going this way, you’re going to fail, and fail and fail. Do you want to spend the rest of your life alone? What the fuck are you doing, you fucking useless shit, what are you Quentin Quentin Quentin -_

“Quentin!”

Quentin stilled as his wrist was caught in a vice grip, the glowing cigarette held fast in mid-air. The spell faltered.

When he turned his head to look, it was Eliot standing by his side, face pale under the moonlight. 

“Quentin--” he broke off, looking panicked and afraid. Every fragment of silence magnified itself and pressed down into the cracks between them. “Quentin. What- what were you doing? Why did you ever, ever think that --” He stopped again, and broke eye contact to shake his head once, in a sharp, jerky movement. His grip on Quentin’s wrist remained tight; long, slender fingers - _curled around a cigarette, around a martini glass, around-_ clenched tight and bloodless against the veins of Quentin’s wrist. 

Some kind of error in the script. Eliot wasn’t supposed to be afraid or broken. Only Quentin. 

“Q?” Eliot said softly. Quentin glanced up. Eliot had crouched down beside Quentin, one arm hesitantly extended. The openness of Eliot’s expression was strange to him. 

Quentin looked back down at his arm. The burns looked ugly and wrong next to Eliot’s pale fingers. Explanations felt like excuses, so he said nothing, and looked back up at Eliot instead, trying to say things without saying anything. 

Eliot’s eyebrows dipped down into a furrow, and his grip on Quentin’s wrist gentled. “Oh, Q,” he said, quietly. “Come inside, we should get those burns looked at.”

He stood and tugged Quentin gently by the wrist, back into the warm dark. Quentin followed.

 

* * *

 

Five nights after the Incident, Quentin folded himself into bed and dreamt of the night before everything had changed. 

Flashing party lights, loud house music, bodies jumping all around, swaying to the music, lots of skin, sticky floors with patches of vomit and alcohol and sadness. Conjured fiery animals in disco lights raced against the darkness. 

The air smelled of vodka and cigarettes, and then Julia appearing by his side, _Quentin, lighten up c’mon!_ James appearing, the three of them hustling him into bed like the old times, his bedroom appearing in an alcove from their secret house, and then instead of James and Julia, it’s Margo lifting the glass from his fingers, teasing and - _Should’ve known you were such a lightweight, Q!_ \- placing the glass down and scratching at her face, peeling her skin off with long fingernails and revealing flesh and muscle, ripping through even that and pulling everything off like a suit until it was just a swarm of beetles crawling across him, scuttling into his mouth and his nostrils and his ears and biting deep into his stomach and Margo’s voice whispering _Drink up, Q!_ in a thousand tongues. 

Then Quentin awoke, and the memories faded away with a sigh.

 

* * *

 

Quentin didn’t do it again, but every time someone lit a cigarette, he looked away and forced his fingers not to twitch. Once, he caught Eliot looking at him, eyebrows drawn into that strange expression of unhappiness. 

Quentin got used to keeping his sleeves rolled down. Eliot never mentioned it, but on dark nights he slipped into Quentin’s room, silently checking the healing scars on his arm, and then just touching, fingers brushing gently across his skin. 

One night when Eliot stood to leave, Quentin grabbed his wrist. Eliot stilled, looked at him in the semi-darkness, and folded himself back into bed. 

Quentin healed, the wounds scabbing over. Eliot came over anyway, slipping into Quentin’s bed in the darkness. And if on those nights, Quentin curled back into Eliot, buried his head in Eliot’s shirt, and listened to the steady thud of Eliot’s heartbeat, no one would know. And if on those nights, Eliot would wrap his arms around Quentin, or run a hand through Quentin’ hair, or draw circles in the curve of Quentin’s elbow, no one would ever see. 

In the silence and the dark, they wrapped themselves around each other and breathed. 


End file.
